Swamimalai's Sthapatis Cast a 27-Foot Nataraja for the 2023 G20 Summit by the Lost-Wax Method Used on Chola Bronzes

Swamimalai bronzes are cast by the lost-wax method. A model is carved in beeswax, coated in clay from the Cauvery river, heated until the wax runs out, and filled with molten metal; the clay mould is then broken to free the image. The Geographical Indications Registry issued its certificate for “Swamimalai Bronze Icons” on 22 April 2008, and the same method produced the 27-foot Nataraja (Shiva as lord of the dance) that stood at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi for the G20 summit of 9 and 10 September 2023.

How a Swamimalai bronze is cast

Swamimalai is a village on the northern bank of the Cauvery in Thanjavur district, Tamil Nadu, and Deccan Herald describes it as one of the six abodes of Lord Murugan. Outlook Traveller’s account of the craft says it begins with a wax model whose proportions follow measurements laid down in the Agama Shastra, a body of temple ritual texts. The sculptor takes those measurements with a strip of coconut leaf cut to the length of the model. The wax is a mixture of beeswax, resin and groundnut oil.

Loam or alluvial soil goes on first and is left to dry. Holes are drilled at chosen points so that the wax can drain out and the metal can be poured in. A second coat of clay and sand follows, dried in the sun for a couple of days, and the mould is bound with metal wire so it does not crack. It is then heated to melt the wax, and Outlook Traveller says the metal is poured while the mould is still hot, because a cold mould would break. The mould is smashed once the bronze cools, and the image is chiselled, engraved and polished.

Conservators at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam describe the same sequence in plain terms. They add that the wax model carries wax channels (sprues and runners) that become the pouring routes, and that the mould is turned over so the wax drains out. The Sanskrit name for the technique in medieval texts is madhucchishtavidhana, “the beeswax method”. Because the wax model and the mould are both destroyed, each casting is one of a kind, a point the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art also makes about Chola bronzes. Outside South India, the Rijksmuseum authors write, large bronze figures are more often cast hollow around a clay core; in the Tamil tradition they are poured solid. The demonstration mould and the statuettes at progressive stages of finishing that illustrate the Rijksmuseum article were made by Sri Jayam Industries, a Swamimalai workshop.

What the Chola bronzes were made for

The Smithsonian describes the Chola dynasty as the dominant cultural, artistic, religious and political force in south India for four hundred years, from the ninth to the thirteenth century. It adds that Shiva Nataraja was the family deity of the dynasty and that Chola kings and queens consolidated their power by dedicating temples and commissioning bronzes.

The museum also explains the purpose. Every Hindu temple has an immovable main image in its sanctum. The bronzes were portable: priests ritually brought them to life, and they were carried out of the sanctum in procession to meet devotees, draped in silks and garlands, on palanquins.

The Nataraja in the museums

The Cleveland Museum of Art holds a Nataraja from Tamil Nadu dated to the 1000s, Chola period. It measures 113 by 102 by 30 centimetres and weighs 116.573 kilograms. The museum’s entry explains the iconography as Hindu thought reads it: time is cyclical, and for those who see Shiva as the supreme divinity he is responsible for both creation and destruction. The ring of fire and the flame in his left hand refer to destruction, the drum in his raised right hand to the beat of time, and the raised lower right hand tells devotees not to fear. With each step he treads on a dwarf figure personifying ignorance.

The Rijksmuseum’s Nataraja is larger: 153 by 114.5 centimetres, with the figure alone weighing about 255 kilograms. The museum bought it in 1935 from the Paris dealer C. T. Loo, and its authors date it on style to the twelfth century. They write that this form of Shiva first appeared as a devotional icon in Tamil temples around the tenth century, and that the name “Nataraja” was most probably popularised by the art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy, since older Sanskrit sources use other terms for dancing Shiva. They also note that most surviving Chola bronzes are still in Tamil temples, where they are dressed, anointed and carried in processions, while those in museums, mainly in Chennai and Thanjavur, were often chance finds turned up by farming or construction.

The Government Museum in Chennai, founded in 1851 and described by the Ministry of Tourism’s Incredible India site as the country’s second-oldest museum, has a Bronze Gallery with sculptures from the 7th century to modern times. The Rijksmuseum article reproduces one of its Natarajas, from Poruppumettupatti and dated to the ninth or early tenth century, 110 centimetres tall.

What X-rays and metal analysis showed

In December 2011 the Rijksmuseum’s Nataraja was scanned in the powerful X-ray unit that Dutch Customs uses on sea cargo containers. The images showed that Shiva, the halo and the dwarf are all solid-cast, with no trace of a clay core or iron armature. The authors also found that the front hands were cast on separately, apparently as a repair made during casting or soon after. X-ray fluorescence put the alloy in line with other Chola-period bronzes, in which copper, tin and lead are usually the main ingredients.

The same study questions a belief held by many scholars and by hereditary casters themselves, that Chola images were made of panchaloha, “five metals”. The authors say there is no agreement on which five, and that the word does not occur in any of the ancient texts they surveyed. Those texts list gold, silver, copper and brass separately, and give no alloy recipes. Modern workshops, they add, do put small amounts of gold and silver into the main alloy for temple bronzes. Their conclusion is that the practical knowledge of metalworking came down through generations of craftsmen more than through the texts.

What the GI registry records

Intellectual Property India’s registry lists “Swamimalai Bronze Icons” as application 64, filed on 26 July 2006 by the Development Commissioner (Handicrafts) for goods in class 6, handicrafts, from Tamil Nadu. The certificate is number 67 and is dated 22 April 2008. The record shows the registration valid up to 25 July 2026 and lists renewal notices from 2016; the page does not show what happened after that date. It lists 57 authorised users, among them the Swamimalai Icon Manufacturers Co-operative Cottage Industrial Society, the Tamil Nadu Handicrafts Development Corporation and individual Swamimalai workshops, Sri Jayam Industries included.

A second record, application 514, covers the Swamimalai Bronze Icons logo. It was filed on 8 January 2015, certificate 246 is dated 31 March 2016, and validity runs to 7 January 2025, with a renewal notice dated 26 November 2024 in its document list.

Counts of the craft’s size differ by source. Outlook Traveller says about three hundred families cast bronze in Swamimalai, while WION, reporting on the G20 statue, speaks of roughly 40 families and nearly 600 artists.

The 27-foot Nataraja of 2023

WION reports that the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), under the Ministry of Culture, commissioned the statue. The Ministry’s own press release says it was made by the traditional sthapatis of Swamimalai in the lost-wax process, following canons and measurements in the Shilpa Shastra. The release says that process has been followed for Nataraja images since the Chola period, from the ninth century onward. It names Radha Krishna Sthapati as the maker, calls the figure 27 feet tall and gives its weight as around 18 tonnes. The same release says the clay comes from a stretch of the Cauvery that runs through Swamimalai.

Hinduism Today and WION describe an alloy of eight metals, ashtadhatu: copper, brass, lead, tin, mercury, iron, gold and silver. WION adds that the figure is 21 feet wide, cost Rs 10 crore (about US$1.2 million) and was built from a wax model divided into 120 parts. Hinduism Today calls it a single-cast, solid statue and names the makers as the brothers Radhakrishnan, Srikantan and Swaminathan, sons of the late master craftsman S. Devasenapathy Sthapati, whose company Jayam Industries uses the Chola lost-wax method.

Reports differ on the schedule. The Ministry’s headline says 30 months of work was completed in six months, while WION reports that the team had under seven months after the tender was approved. By 6 September 2023 the statue was in place, as a Prime Minister’s Office release of that date records. A Ministry release of 26 September 2023 records an IGNCA symposium, “Nataraja: Manifestation of Cosmic Energy”, at the Dr. Ambedkar International Centre in Delhi, where the maker was felicitated.

The 2004 gift to CERN

Fritjof Capra, the physicist and author, posted an account on 20 June 2004. On 18 June 2004, he wrote, a 2-metre statue of Shiva Nataraja was unveiled at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Geneva. He says the Indian government gave it to CERN to mark the laboratory’s long association with India.

Capra says the parallel between Shiva’s dance and the dance of subatomic particles was first set out in his 1972 article “The Dance of Shiva: The Hindu View of Matter in the Light of Modern Physics”, and then became the central metaphor of his 1975 book The Tao of Physics. A plaque beside the statue carries quotations from Coomaraswamy and from Capra, including this line from Capra: “For the modern physicists, then, Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter.” The plaque’s last quotation, also from Capra, says that Indian artists made images of dancing Shivas in bronze hundreds of years ago. India’s cooperation with CERN, from a 1991 agreement to associate membership in 2017, is covered in India and the Large Hadron Collider. The UNESCO-listed Chola temples at Thanjavur, Gangaikondacholapuram and Darasuram are covered in the Great Living Chola Temples, and the king who built the Thanjavur temple is profiled in Rajaraja Chola.

The pages opened for this article do not say who cast the CERN statue or how, so this piece does not attribute it to Swamimalai.